Perpetually Bored

I find myself unable to game casually. For me, it’s all the way or not at all. Having being turned down from a few raiding guilds on Najena, I find it hard to swallow the feelings of rejection and turn to one of the more casual ones.

Being able to excel and achieve is an important goal for me, not just in a game, but anything else I do. This is the same reason that allows me to dedicate myself to one particular game and nothing else for years. I’d much rather succeed at one than be mediocre at a few. The sense of achievement and accomplishment are huge motivators in my gameplay. When the chances of them start diminishing, I find myself rapidly lose interesting in the game concerned.

What’s your playstyle?

Over the course of last weekend, I hit Lvl 90 and moved to the Najena server. Najena has a good fraction of population that are Australians, who has a rather similar timezone to mine. It’s about two to three hours ahead of me in Sydney, depending on if Daylight Savings Time is in effect. That was the motivating factor behind my move. I had hoped to be able to get groups on the nights that I do come home from base and perhaps even raid some.

Now that I’m over here on Najena, I’m disappointed and find myself regretting my move. The (low) frequency of groups hasn’t changed compared to being on Antonia Bayle. Despite there being a little more chatter in the channels during my evenings, I wasn’t getting into any groups at all. On the raiding front, although there are number of guilds that do carry out raids in the evenings, compared to zero on AB, none of them seems too keen on recruiting a Wizard. I’m stubborn though, and I love my class. I’ve been playing a Wizard since launch, and I’m not going to reroll to a class that is greater in demand. Logging in and staring at my screen for the next couple of hours depresses me.

I find myself in a bit of bind. I love the game, but I’m caught in a stagnant position and there doesn’t seem to be any way that I can improve my character. With groups being hard to find and raiding opportunities almost non-existent for me, I’m cut off from a good part of the game’s content. My passion for Everquest 2 only goes so far before I  start to question my next month’s subscription and source for other avenues of entertainment.

Has anyone noticed that the con system in Sentinel’s Fate is extremely unpredictable? There are some single ^ named mobs that have a ton of HP and are able to beat the crap out of me, such as the Forlorn Drake in Toxxulia Forest, despite me being able to solo a number of ^^ or ^^^ named heroics just fine. On the other hand, some of the Epic x4s in The Hole can be easily one-grouped, and there are even Epic x2s in some group instances.

Isn’t the whole point of the con system to provide a the player with a feedback of the estimated difficulty of the mob? While some over and under-cons are are typically the case, they don’t deviate too far from the expected margins. This is drastic.

I figured that since everyone would be busy questing away trying to level, I’d attempt to snag a few discoveries from tradeskilling. I was able to get most of the server-wide discoveries for the level 80 – 82 Provisioner crafts, making an adventure level in the process too from all the mobs I had to kill while harvesting. I had to leave for work then, and when I returned, I was twelve hours behind. All that can be discovered had been discovered by then.

That was when I started going through the adventure quests and exploring. The land mass is huge, and although I did enjoy the view offered while traveling on the NPC mounts from point to point initially, the long duration of the travel soon became rather irksome. I got annoyed, I got impatient. The disc-shaped mounts looked fantastic though, and riding on them reminded me of my Magus in Warhammer Online.

Taking the advise of the public, I found my way into a Hole group, where I experienced the fastest leveling I’ve ever done in EQ2. My group found a spot where large encounters of mobs constantly spawn, and with very little respawn time inbetween too. With full vitality and a 55% experience potion, I went from level 82 to 85 in about two hours. I finally understood the reason behind the significant amounts of level 90s I’ve seen in game barely a day after launch. There’s been much debate over whether the high amount of exp given by the group mobs in the Hole are intended  or a result of some mathematical formula gone wild. Either way, now that the game has already been launched in such a fashion, it’s too late to ponder over if which was the desired outcome but accept the situation as it is.

Asides from the whole international cd key fiasco, launch day went by very well. The server came up on time, and remained up. Performance was also good, despite the heavier load. I think the development and members of the IT team did a really good job with the load balancing and scaling.

I’m thankful that I didn’t have to experience any of the issues that the intentional player base is experience trying to obtain keys for Sentinel’s Fate, due to me winning a copy of the game from the trivia Stargrace held on Twitter yesterday. Hugs to you Stargrace, I’m eternally grateful.

In the history of EQ2 expansion launches, this one has to be the worst. The sites that SOE partnered with either didn’t accept orders from specific countries, or ran out of keys in the case of DLGamer (who also refused to accept Singapore purchases, btw). Worse still, DLGamer heavily oversold and accepted the money of players even though they did not have the products to back it up.  When Kiara visited the #EQ2 IRC channel on ZAM during the hours leading up to launch, she was faced with an anger mob of international gamers, who were out to lynch.

Despite me sharing many similar sentiments as the players who were not able to obtain the game, I felt that Kiara was being treated unfairly. Without her, it is possible that no international customer would have even been able to play on launch day itself. Rather, the responsibility for the whole fiasco lies with the invisible people in upper echelon of SOE’s management, the cold businessmen in suits. At the end of the day, the international community still constitutes a sizable force in the playerbase and there’s no reason to treat them as second-rate customers just because they do not live in North America.

I still have not quite figured out how I am going to obtain Sentinal’s Fate on launch day yet. Kiara mentioned over at the community forums that the marketing team has been working on allowing international customers to purchase Sentinal’s Fate digitally on launch day. The idea of delaying digital orders until a week after launch is a poor marketing decision, and flies against all logic. While most companies are looking to champion digital distribution as a means  for rapidly distributing their products without the messy and cumbersome logistical lines, implementing an artificial  delay seems to foolish.

I think SOE did realize that,  and made some noble efforts to amend that decision. However, at the time of this writing, none of the pre-order sites catered for international customers seem to be accepting orders from Singapore. DLGamer seemed to offer it, until I attempted to pay for it, and there wasn’t a single payment option listed for my country.

Sentinal’s Fate is still not listed on Steam yet. Hopefully it accepts my order there, otherwise it looks like I’m getting screwed. Sigh.

It’s as if the web has been engulfed by a blanket of silence. For the past few days that I’m home, there hardly has been any activity. Instead of the 50 over new articles that my RSS reader picks up per day, it has been a trickle of two or three max. It would seem that the activities of the holiday season was successful in uprooting people from their seats.

The extended weekend has been unremarkable for me, even borderlining on absolute boredom. I did manage to play a couple hours of EQ2, which is quite remarkable considering I hardly find any reason to do so these days. Station Market has a really neat 44 slot backpack, the Sinister Frostfell Backpack, complete with a Frostfell-theme appearance. At $20, it was pricey, but I gave in, though more so for the number of slots than it’s appearance.

At the same time, Steam is having a major discount on a number of games, and Christmas capitalism was having an effect on me, resulting in me buying a number of games for $10 and under. A number of them, despite their ratings and associated hype, felt rather mediocre to me. The campaign in Red Alert 3 seemed to be progressing at too fast a pace compared to it’s predecessors. A few missions in and I already had the full tech tree unlocked and was driving the enemy back into, uh, wherever they came from. Contrast that to the campaigns of before, where one side usually had a solid 12 – 15 missions. FarCry 2’s gameplay was unimpressive either. The majority of time involved traveling and the firefights were sporadic.

My spending didn’t stop there. While reading an article entitled Faux Friendship about the changes in the way friendship is characterized and defined in relation to the proliferation of social networking sites, I stumbled across an amazing TV series, ‘In Treatment’.

In Treatment is drama revolving a psychotherapist and five patients of his, with five episodes each week, and each episode being a session with a patient. After watching an episode on Google Video, I was completely hooked, and bought the whole season on DVD. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s phenomenal. I’m trying to not blow through the entire season at once, but there’s hardly anything else to do.

Race change potions have been added to the Station Marketplace in EQ2, and I was more than willingly to indulge myself in one. For quite sometime, I’ve been wanting to be an Erudite instead of a High Elf. I love the mysterious and alien look of the Erudite. It is as if in they’ve neglected their corporal form in the search of magic and the amount of power in them have twisted them into what looks like a twisted shriveled body, but one that contains pure power. In a way, it is like a cross between the Emperor from Star Wars and Voldemort from the Harry Potter series.

The potion can be bought for 2500 station cash, the same as what it takes for a character transfer. Some people however, are visibly upset with the race change potions. As Stargrace kindly pointed out to me, this would let someone be a Dark Elf Paladin easily instead of having to make a Shadowknight and betray it over, making some combinations of race and class easily obtainable without any effort.

The Headless Horseman is an epic x2 mob that spawns during the Nights of the Dead festival from a dead looking tree in Neklutos Forest near the Darklight Woods entrance. He drops a couple of awesome pieces and is an easy kill if done right.

I managed to put together slightly over one and half groups for him. To get him to spawn, at least one member of the raid force needs the necklace obtained from doing the Halloween maze. He’s on an one to three hour spawn timer, and upon spawning, goes for the person with the necklace in their inventory in an attempt to snatch it off. If the person dies, the necklace is consumed. Otherwise, it can be used again for subsequent spawns.

In only place where The Headless Horseman can be killed effectively is on the grounds with the field of bones near the tree. My first attempt lasted almost 45 minutes before wiping because we were clueless on the strategy and tanked him elsewhere, where he had a 99% damage resist debuff. Stupid of us, but we were all once young and naive.

Tanked in the right spot, he was easier than cake and took little effort.

Carrying on from where I left off yesterday, I assembled a group this morning in a vain attempt to kill Varsoon and finish up yesterday’s instance. After which, I spent the next couple hours spamming the channels looking a Palace of Ferzhul group while grinding out some writs. I even had time to spare, drawing a flowchart of how terrible my weekends are should anyone ask on the following work day.

In the mist of spamming LFGs, I learnt how to use Visio too. No more PowerPoint flowcharts for me.

The day didn’t just end there. I was saved by Latharek late the in afternoon who put together a PoF group for me. That’s the guy who also helped me get my T4 armor too. I owe him lots. Since our group’s Troubadour also had a saved Varsoon only instance of PoF, there was some confusion in determining whose instance, whether mine or his, to use so that one of us wouldn’t get the ‘you may not enter an instance created prior to when your previous instances minimum lockout timer expired’ message. I’ve never had an issue understanding the message, but it can be confusing for some. For heroic zones with a typical 18 hours lockout, what it simply means is that, if you zone into and instance and have a lockout starting at 0100h, you won’t be able to enter another person’s instance unless it his lockout started after 1900h on that day. How did I get the latter number? Time my instance was created + lockout time (18h). It’s only fair because otherwise could constantly do another instance someone else created and never having a lockout yourself. Perhaps I worded it badly, and still do, thus I ended up drawing a small diagram to explain.

Hope I made sense.

Back to the group, we ended up killing Varsoon twice. First time using the saved instance which was cleared up to Varsoon and incurring no lockout penalty, and then resetting it and clearing the whole zone again. Finally, I have my Dagger of the Ethernaut Magus, and wrapped up the TSO signature line. I plan to finish up the signatures and weapon quests from other expansions too eventually, but that’s for another day.